CHAPTER TWENTY
On day five I slept at Jess’s house for six hours and then went to the school.
They had done a drive.
That is the word the office used on the phone.
We did a little drive for your family, whenever you can come by.
I got there at two in the afternoon and there were nine black contractor bags lined up along the wall in the front office, plus four cardboard boxes, plus a stack of composition notebooks with a rubber band around it and a plastic tub of school supplies.
Nine bags.
I stood in a school office and looked at nine garbage bags of other people’s clothes.
I want to say something about that, and I want to say it carefully, because those people were good and I have never once forgotten it.
In those bags were winter coats in Danny’s size that were better than the one that burned.
There was a pair of boots for Ivy with about four days of wear on them.
Somebody put in a brand new package of little girls’ underwear with the tag still on it, which is a thing you only think of if you have actually been through something.
And I stood there with my hands in my pockets and could not make myself pick one up.
The assistant principal came out. Renata Cortez, fifties, half glasses, cardigan, the kind of woman who runs a building.
“Mrs. Halloran.” She took both my hands, which I had not offered. “How is he?”
“He’s awake. He’s out of the woods.”
“Oh, thank God. Thank God.” She let go and put a hand flat on her own chest. “We’ve all been beside ourselves. Ivy’s been so brave. She came right back to school this morning, did you know that? This morning.”
“She wanted to.”
“She spoke to her class.” Cortez smiled at me, and it was a real smile, warm and pleased, and it went into me about four inches. “Mr. Ruiz let her, and she stood up in front of everybody and told them about the fire, and about how the fire department came, and about her dad.”
“About her dad.”
“She said he was one of the men who got them out.” She shook her head, still smiling. “I don’t know how you people do it. Truly. To have your own family in there.”
The heat was going up the back of my neck.
There were three staff members in that office and a kid on a chair waiting for the nurse and a phone ringing.
I could have said it. Six words. He wasn’t there, he was off. And then there would have been a silence in that office, and questions, and by Friday it would have been all over a building with four hundred children in it, one of whom is mine.
“They were incredible,” I said. “All of them. The whole crew was incredible.”
Every word of that is true.
I have gotten quite good at that this year. You can go a very long way on things that are technically true. My husband taught me, though he did not know he was doing it, and I picked it up the way you pick up somebody’s hands.
I took two bags to the car and Cortez had a custodian bring the rest, and I sat in the parking lot for a while.
That night I sat on the end of the bed in Jess’s daughter’s room while Ivy did her math homework on the floor.
“Mrs. Cortez told me you talked to your class.”
“Mm.”
“Ivy.”
She kept writing. “Yeah.”
“What did you tell them?”
“About the fire.”
“And about Dad.”
The pencil stopped.
She did not look up. She turned the pencil around and started erasing something that I am fairly sure did not need erasing, and she did it for a while.
“I said he was there,” she said.
“He wasn’t there.”
“I know.”
“So why did you say it?”
And my daughter put the pencil down and looked up at me, and she was not defiant and she was not ashamed. She was doing what she always does. She was explaining something she had already worked out.
“Because Madison’s mom already said it,” she said. “In the group. She put it on the class thing with a fire emoji and a bunch of people put hearts. Before I even came back.”
“Okay.”
“So if I said no, then they’d ask why not, and then they’d ask where he was, and I don’t know where he was.” She looked straight at me when she said that. “Do you?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to tell me?”
“Not tonight.”
“Okay,” she said, and picked the pencil back up.
Then, after about ten seconds, without looking up:
“Is it a lie if somebody else says it and you just don’t fix it?”
I sat on the end of a bed in a room that wasn’t ours.
I could see the parking lot. I could see the man from 2A with his travel mug turning around to tell forty people, and I could see myself standing three feet from him in a gray blanket with my mouth shut, letting it go out across that asphalt like something poured.
“Yes,” I said. “It is.”
“Okay,” she said.
And that was it. She went back to her fractions and I sat there.
I did not tell her to fix it.
I have thought about that more than almost anything else in this whole business.
I sat on a bed and looked at the top of my ten-year-old’s head and I did not say you need to tell them the truth, because I had not told them the truth, and because a woman who has just done a thing herself does not get to hand it to a child as an assignment.
I told myself I would deal with it when I could do it honestly.
That took until the end of February, and by then it had cost her more than it should have, and that one is mine.
Later that night, in the dark, on Jess’s couch, I looked at the video.
I knew it was there. Jess had not mentioned it, which is how I knew.
It was on the neighborhood page and then it was on a local news page and by then it had been shared enough times that the original didn’t matter. Forty-one seconds. Vertical. The front of my building lit white, water coming off the brick, a hose stream going in at three.
At second twenty-six the phone swings right and there is a woman standing in a parking lot in a gray blanket, barefoot, with her hair flat to her head.
You cannot see my face. That is the only mercy in it.
Under it there were four hundred and some comments.
Praying for this family.
My cousin lives in that building thank god everyone got out.
That’s a firefighter’s family. He got his own kids out. God bless that man.
That one had two hundred and eleven reactions.
I lay on a couch at one in the morning and read two hundred and eleven people being moved by something that did not happen.
There were three or four in there that were not like the others.
Somebody wrote does anyone know why it took so long to get to 4?
and got four replies telling her this was not the time.
Somebody else wrote one sentence with no punctuation that said ask what shift he was on and it had no reactions at all and was gone by morning.
I looked at that one for a long time.
Then I put the phone face down on my chest, which I noticed, and I lay there in a dark living room and listened to somebody else’s furnace come on.
At twenty past nine the next morning, standing in the hospital parking structure, I got a voicemail from a number I didn’t know.
He was polite. He apologized twice for calling, once at the start and once at the end.
“Mrs. Halloran, this is Dean Ostrander, I’m an investigator with the Fire Investigation Bureau. I’m working the origin and cause on the Fenwick Street fire. When you’re able, and no rush at all, I’d like to get a statement from you about that night. Just what you saw and what you heard.”
There was a pause on the recording.
“Anything you heard,” he said.